Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment she has made of the effect of the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive 2000 on how floods have been controlled in the UK.

Implementation of the Water Framework Directive is devolved within the UK.

Implementation of the Directive promotes, through river basin planning, an integrated approach to managing water and promotes local decisions in catchments to take account of the particular circumstances. Where parts of rivers are managed for certain uses (including flood protection), they are formally designated as ‘heavily modified’ and the management of those rivers must take account of those uses. In England, 1,105 of 3,767 rivers are designated as heavily modified; 781 of them because of their important role in providing flood protection.

Many of the actions needed to protect and improve the quality of the water environment (for instance restoring peat land, wetland creation and sustainable management of soils) also help to reduce flooding. The Directive also promotes sustainable flood risk prevention and flood management schemes. Consideration of natural flood management measures to slow, store and filter flood water can deliver additional social and environmental benefits when used along with traditional hard defences, and can increase resilience of communities to extreme events, both floods and drought. The ‘Slowing the Flow’ project in Pickering is an example of this.